Strauss, Richard

Autograph Musical Manuscript Signed, Richard Str, two pages, folio, undated. Together with a typewritten letter of the composers son, Dr. Franz Strauss, dated July 24, 1978, stating that manuscript sketches of his father are very rare.

This manuscript is [leaf] 31 of a sketch from Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio, comprising thirty measures over eleven systems of the second part of the octet, with the lyrics in Italian.

Richard Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio, was composed in 1940-1941 and first performed at the Staatsoper in Munich in October 1942. The libretto is by Clemens Krauss which owed much to assistance from Hans Swarowsky, Strauss himself, [Stefan] Zweig and even [Hugo von] Hofmannsthal. It is described as a conversation piece . Capriccio might so easily have been an old mans indulgence, an opera with, as its basic idea, an unresolved discussion on Strausss favorite topic of the relative importance in opera of words and music. Yet by setting the scene in a pre-Revolution French château by symbolizing the problem through the rivalry for the Countesss love of a poet and a musician, by introducing the character of a theater director with elements of Reinhardt in his makeup; and by the crowning inspiration (by the Count) that poet and musician should compose an opera about the events they are enacting, Krauss provided Strauss, through this marvelous one-act libretto, with what he had for so long craved, a second Rosenkavalier, without the longueurs. None of his opera scores is more refined, more translucent, more elegant, more varied and none ends so magically, with a long soliloquy for the Countess in which Strausss melodic vein and consummate stagecraft show no diminution in their capacity to enslave an audience [The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians].